No, it's not about the 1984 movie staring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. When I was working for a design firm that specialized in designing and implementing environmental programs for brick-and-mortar retailers in the 1990s and early 2000s, this term was frequently used to describe what we did for our clients.

Most companies in the business of selling hard and soft lines of merchandise, banking, automotive and other products and services, were then and are still today faced with the dilemma of a competitive climate in which it was more and more difficult to distinguish yourself based on the unique products you sell, the "stones," owing to the fact that others in your niche had the same or similar ones.
Read more: ROMANCING THE STONE

Each year at this time we look back, sometimes with regret; and forward, sometimes with trepidation. Setting aside the intellectual sloppiness, or arbitrariness, of selecting a given time of year to make such an assessment — winter introspection likely being a vestige of our agricultural and tribal heritage — any excuse for taking a time out from the hectic pace of modern life is welcome.

Zen meditation is a top-tier example of such a time-out. Shohaku Okumura Roshi referred to zazen as a "vacation." Where every other activity is a form of output, zazen is all input, he said. Everything else is work. We are fortunate to have this "excellent method as the essence of the teaching" as Master Dogen puts it. So, if we are making a year's end inventory of those things for which we are thankful, zazen is certainly near the top of the list.
Read more: CELEBRATING THE OLD YEAR - WELCOMING THE NEW

Improvisation is a term that may apply to all, or at least most, activities in life; but I became most aware of its meaning in the context of music, specifically jazz. My father led a jazz quintet in the 1940s and my brother was a successful jazz pianist, having become a musical prodigy at an early age.

While I never had his training in music, owing to the changing conditions of growing up in a family struggling to pay the bills — which meant that my father often worked on construction jobs in other towns, and consequently did not spend the time and resources on myself and my other siblings that he had devoted to training my brother to play the piano — I came to understand that, as far as the ideals of jazz are concerned, improvisation was the holy grail, much more highly valued than the ability to play by rote, or even to read notation. The idea that whatever one can hear — musically speaking, and in one's mind — should come out through the instrument unimpeded, was what was meant by the expression "playing." As in "He is playing his (derriere) off," as my brother-in-law, a trumpet player, would often say of my brother. It is one of the highest compliments in jazz circles.

So I was exposed to this idea at an early age, probably when I was in high school. I had taught myself to draw around the second or third grade, probably to garner attention in a category other than music, as that option was clearly already taken. And my sisters were the dancers in the brood. At the time, I didn't think of my drawing as improvisation, though I quickly graduated from copying Walt Disney characters to making up my own, developing a comic strip featuring our pet dog, "Squeaky," a fox terrier to whom I was very attached. But later on, I recognized that what I found interesting about art, performance or plastic, was definitely in the area of improvisation.
Read more: IMPROVISATION